my brain … maybe this was where he’d stashed his credit card receipts for flowers, motel visits, jewelry. On the other hand, perhaps being whacked on the head and sustaining a visit from a violent narcissist unleashed more industrial-strength paranoia in the cerebral cortex.
I dug reluctantly into the bag of albums. As it turned out, Tom had purchased another photo album since our wedding. He hadn’t mounted anything in it, but he’d tidily rubber-banded the photos from the last year and stuck them inside. Guilt juiced through my veins when I saw Tom’s pictures of me barbecuing for our little family’s first picnic, of Julian standing by the fountain at the University of Colorado student union. I scooped up the photos and slapped them back inside the new album. Then, unable to help myself, I finished my nefarious snooping task, shaking each of our old albums to see if any incriminating papers fell out.
An old envelope dropped to the van floor. I bent and retrieved it. Inside was a snapshot of John Richard in his white doctor coat. His blond hair tousled, his hands in his pockets, he was smiling with all the charm that had hypnotized so many women - me included. I didn’t remember saving the picture, but perhaps I had and just didn’t recall. Or maybe Arch, ever the idealist when it came to his father, had tucked it away. I slipped the picture back into the envelope and dropped it into my purse.
Finally I reached Tom’s own ancient album. When I shook it, newspaper articles and stray photos cascaded into my lap. “Army Veteran Graduates First,” screamed a proud headline of the Furman County Sheriffs Department newsletter, detailing Tom’s triumphant graduation at the top of his class from police academy. “Top Cop Honored” was another one, for the time Tom had received an award for finding a group of paintings stolen from a Denver art dealer and stashed in an Aspen Meadow garage. Then there was a much older photograph: Tom in his Cub Scout uniform, curly sandy-brown hair, chubby cheeks, crooked smile.
It was too much. I cracked open the yellowed pages of the old album and admired each photo of my dear Tom. As I worked my way through the book, I tried to replace each item I’d shaken loose in its original order.
Page after page showed Tom with school friends, in his army uniform, with cop buddies. My suspicion turned to pride, then to bitter humiliation for doubting him. He had been delirious after he’d been wounded yesterday, that was all there was to it. I had replaced nearly every article and photo when, suddenly, I was brought up short.
“Local Nurse Reported Killed in Mekong Delta Helo Crash” was the headline from a 1975 article. I stared down at it and recalled what I knew: that Tom had been engaged to a woman named Sara who’d been a few years ahead of him in high school. Sara had gone to nursing school and then been assigned to a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, a MASH, in Vietnam. As soon as he turned eighteen, Tom had enlisted and followed her over. That was all that he’d told me, except that they’d never actually seen each other in that war-ravaged country before she was killed. But hadn’t she died in an artillery shelling, not a helicopter crash?
There was a graduation photo of her in her white nurse’s cap and uniform. Sara Beth O’Malley had been a pretty young woman with wavy dark hair and a face glowing with youth, enthusiasm, and pride. I swallowed. On the photo, she’d written: Love you forever, S.B.
I sat there for a long time. I’d seen her, of course. Her face was now thinner, the youthful glow long gone. But the years had not rendered her unrecognizable. I’d announced I was Goldy Schulz. I’m just waiting, she’d said, when I’d stared into the battered station wagon. She’d started the car and pulled away. I’d been so eager to suspect her that I hadn’t registered - much less understood - her expression as she whipped the wagon away from the curb.
Her lips had trembled; her eyes had been filled with pain.
A cold wind rocked the van as I started down our street. Questions tumbled through my mind: Is she really Sara? What was she doing here? I remembered the title of one of Tom’s e-mails. Call to State Department. Even worse, I wondered how in the world I was going to broach all this to Tom. Hey, honey? Any old flames still burning? I did wonder how someone who’d been reported dead in Vietnam could disappear for all these years. If the woman in the station wagon was Sara Beth O’Malley, where had she been for the last couple of decades?
And in the question department, I had a few more: Why had our computers been stolen? Could Sara Beth O’Malley have doubled back to pick them up? No … it had to have been “Morris Hart,” whoever he was. Besides the e-mails from Sara Beth, there had been all those communications from Andy to Tom. Was Morris Hart connected somehow with the stamp thieves? Was he Ray Wolff’s missing partner?
To the west, swirls of fog scudded in front of a thin cloud cover the hue of gray flannel. My stomach growled. It was already eleven forty-five of a morning that felt far too long and threatened snow. My body was not going to allow me another crisis-laden day without regular meals.
Nevertheless, there was a place I wanted to visit before returning to Hyde Castle. Some injuries you take very personally. Your husband being shot, for example. I did not know if the Hydes and Charde would still be at the chapel, where I definitely wanted to look around. But another site I wanted to check was the one staked out by the shooter. No doubt, the Furman County Sheriff’s Department would do a good job investigating. But an attempt on Tom’s life was too traumatic for me to just go back to the day-to-day life of catering without making sure the department was doing a thorough job. I envisioned Tom rolling his eyes.
I turned left on Homestead Drive, wound past the Homestead Museum, then gunned the van through an old neighborhood dotted with rustic log cabins. The road changed from dirt to pavement, and 1 ascended through an upscale subdivision filled with gray and beige mansionettes sporting tile roofs and landscaped lawns that looked desolate under their dustings of snow. I hooked the van right onto a dirt road that quickly deteriorated to a rutted trail. The van had a compass display, which indicated I was heading east, paralleling Cottonwood Creek. I tried to picture what I’d seen from the police chopper, then decided I was heading toward the right spot.
Finally, I entered Cottonwood Park, a county-maintained facility where folks could hike, picnic, even camp overnight. I turned right onto another dirt road that looked as if it snaked down to the creek. I bumped past empty, snow-crusted picnic tables, forlorn-looking freestanding grills, and carved wooden signs indicating trailheads. At length I came to a stand of pines cordoned off with bright yellow police ribbons.
I parked behind a pair of sheriff’s department vehicles and made my way down one edge of the yellow tape, where two uniformed officers yelled that I should stop. I identified myself and asked to come in to talk. They considered this for a minute, then signaled me to enter.
I scooted under the plastic ribbon. My boots slipped on the thick carpeting of snow-slick pine needles. The two cops asked for ID, which I showed them.
“I want to see where the guy was standing when my husband was shot. Please,” I added politely.
“That area’s been thoroughly checked for evidence,” one officer informed me, his tone simultaneously defensive and weary. When I said nothing, he softened a bit. “All right, the crime-scene guys are done. You can look, but just for a minute.” He told me to follow him.
We made our way through the snow and rocks to a picnic table about fifteen feet from a promontory overlooking the creek. It seemed an odd place for a table, since the ground fell away steeply to the narrow state highway. If you or your kids tumbled down the rocks and onto the pavement, could you sue the county park system?
“We figure the shooter was about
here,” my guide told me as we stepped gingerly to the edge of the promontory. “Hidden from the road by the rocks, so no one would notice him.”
The view revealed only the top of one of Hyde Castle’s towers. Below the castle’s driveway and dense evergreens, the trickle through Cottonwood Creek was alternately black and still or white with suds, in sharp contrast to the steep creek banks covered with ice and rocks. Hyde Chapel’s lofty spires and dark stone made it look as if it had been transported from an Arthurian-legend board game. In the parking lot, where Tom and I had been moving toward each other when he was shot, a police car and the crime-lab van were the only vehicles. I could see the line of boulders where we’d sought cover. Andy Balachek’s body, of course, was gone.
The chapel, the bridge, the parking lot, Andy’s corpse: I stared down and tried to make sense of what I was looking at. Maybe the shooter was aiming for whatever cop found the body. But if a law-enforcement person discovered Andy, wouldn’t the shooter be putting himself in the line of fire? Then again, Tom was a cop, and he’d been helpless against a concealed sharpshooter.
Maybe someone wasn’t just looking for whoever found Andy. Perhaps he was aiming specifically for Tom. Or maybe he’d been aiming for me, and hadn’t obtained a good enough angle the first time I’d hopped out of the van to look at the creek. Or
possibly there was some other motive that I did not know. Maybe someone had followed Tom, wanting to shoot him. Maybe someone had followed me and shot Tom instead. The answer to why remained elusive.
